f them. Near the same town I investigated the case of
a peaceful villager, reported in the current conversation of the story
to have had his ears cut off and to have been finished off with a
half-dozen bayonet wounds. This I got at first hand from the man who
had seen the body. I asked him how he knew the man had been bayoneted by
Germans. My informant said that he himself was running from the village,
where a skirmish was going on between a regiment of the enemy (Germans)
and Belgian carabineers, that he was racing for his life through a rain
of bullets, etc., etc., and that under fire of sharpshooters he stumbled
across this body. He did not know the man was dead; but the case
interested him. So later he went back (still under fire of the
sharpshooters) and counted the number of holes in the man's shirt; there
were six, he told me, and he was sure from the shape of the holes that
they were the result of bayonets, not bullets.

At one time when driving from Ghent toward Brussels with Julius Van Hee,
the acting Consul-General of the United States at Ghent, we passed a
little hillock of ground upon which was a small square slab of stone,
topped by a pair of sticks--hardly more than sticks--in the shape of a
cross. There was a yarn floating around the neighborhood, which had
almost crystallized into legend, that this was the fresh grave of a
child murdered by the Germans because it refused to salute. They said
the feet had been cut off and the boy was left to bleed to death.
Conceivably the story was true. We did not stop, for we could not carry
the investigation to the point of digging up a fresh grave.

On the evening previous Van Hee had gone over to his office to lock up
preparatory to our early start for Brussels. A woman of Louvain stood
on the doorstep. How on earth she had ever got back to Ghent, neither
Van Hee nor Luther, who was in Van Hee's office and who told me the
story, could make out from her incoherent words. She had been torn from
her family, driven from house and home with a mob of wretched women, and
shipped into Cologne, Germany. She was almost starved; several others
went mad for lack of water. She now believed herself a widow. Between
tears and hysterics she told how soldiers had entered her house, how two
of them had held her husband against the wall at the point of a
revolver, while "several" others in succession violated her before her
husband's eyes!!

These stories are not pleasa